Posts Tagged ‘Alon Shvut’

Late last month, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was condemned universally, when everyone but Ann Coulter called him a racist and a bigot for suggesting federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel should have recused himself from the Trump University trial because his parents were born in Mexico, and he, Trump, as he so aptly put it, is “building a wall.” Trump went on to tell various reporters that although the judge was born in Indiana, he must be a Trump hater, on account of “I’m building a wall.” He also told one reporter that the same obligation to recuse themselves should also apply to Muslim American judges in Trump-related cases (the candidate generates thousands of them, literally).

The fact that both House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R- Kentucky) called on their party’s nominee to tone down the racism should tell us just how much they loathed his outburst.

On Friday morning, Ha’aretz op-ed writer Uri Misgav, in reviewing the recent Supreme Court decision that sided with the Chief Rabbinate and against the AG in prohibiting “alternative” kosher certifications, wrote the following:

“The ruling was by a majority of two to one. The two judges who preserved the corrupting power in the hands of the Rabbinate were Rubinstein and Noam Sohlberg. Both wear a yarmulke, [and are] religious Orthodox, who grew up and developed on the high road of Religious Zionism. They put the cats in charge of the cream. This was a very strangely composed panel. In fact, it was so strange that it’s not strange at all: of course it was intentional. With the assumption that it’s better to let the religious handle these issues which are close to their hearts. Except that the logic should have been the complete opposite of that. There’s a clear conflict of interests here. At stake was the tension between state and religion. The secular judge, incidentally, had the minority opinion.”

The paragraph above is dripping bigotry, not only accusing supreme court judges of being unable to examine a case on its merits, suspending their personal views—which is something we expect of every judge in every trial—but that somehow the powers-that-be on the court assigned the two religious Orthodox judges because the case belongs in their ghetto. The root of Trump’s bigotry and the root of Misgav’s bigotry are the same: they both assume that judges belonging to the group they hate are inevitably partial, interested parties in the cases they try.

But then Misgav focuses on Judge Sohlberg, calling him a criminal, because he resides in Alon Shvut, at the heart of Gush Etzion, an area which even Misgav agrees will never be handed over to Arab rule, even as part of a two-state agreement. Writing for a newspaper that has printed many miles of allegations against rightwing activists and politicians who have threatened the Supreme Court for its unprecedented activism, Misgav actually exposed Sohlberg to prosecution by a European court as a war criminal. The scenario is simple: Judge Sohlberg lands in Brussels, someone on the same El Al flight identifies him and calls over the Gendarmes, showing them the English translation of Misgav’s attack, demanding that Sohlberg be taken into custody until the war crime charges against him are verified. Unrealistic? Probably, but when MK Moti Yogev (Habayit Hayehudi) last summer announced, “We have to take the blade of a D-9 [bulldozer] to the High Court of Justice,” Ha’aretz took his expression of rage at face value.

It appears Ha’aretz is willing to see Israeli high court justices’ lives be put in jeopardy just to advance the paper’s political ends. So much for tolerance and liberalism.

When your kids are coming home on the bus from school every day accompanied by the blaring of emergency vehicle sirens, when stabbings, rammings and shootings have become a regular occurrence in the one quarter mile stretch of highway directly outside your community, when a majority of the children are suffering from some version of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and your neighbors have become numb to the grotesque situation, a mother has to act.

And that is why a mild-mannered, piano lesson-giving mother of five from the suburb of Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion neighborhood of southern Jerusalem, acted.

Rivka Epstein Hattin decided it was time for the mothers to unite.

Hattin began calling, emailing and texting friends and neighbors, many of whom have been struggling to find an answer which will stop the terrorism making their children’s lives miserable.

The response, Hattin said, from the IDF and the politicians has been to put more soldiers on the roads. But those soldiers can’t stop a determined terrorist from ramming or stabbing or shooting an innocent person, they can only limit the extent of the damage. It is an after-the-fact band-aid, not a preventive measure.

So the women decided to hold a rally in the Gush Etzion Junction, the central point of a harrowing number of terrorist attacks over the past year and a half. The rally was set for 4:00 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 23.

They decided to hold a rally of mothers (and supporters), to show that it is unacceptable for anyone to become numb to the deaths and attempted murders. They were calling out to the security forces, the army, the politicians, crying out: “you are not keeping our children safe and alive!”

Hattin told the JewishPress.com the day before the rally that last November, Dalia Lemkus, a 26 year-old woman from Tekoa, was stabbed to death by a terrorist just outside Hattin’s window. A few months earlier and just across the street, the three Israeli teenage boys were kidnapped and then murdered.

There is a free flow of traffic on Route 367 which passes Alon Shvut. That route then pours into the junction with the major highway 60. It is just around that junction, in front of Alon Shvut, where traffic frequently backs up and no one can move. There’s a gas station, a huge supermarket, and a restaurant just before the circle, all of which contribute to the traffic. It is a perfect place for an attack, if the attackers don’t mind being injured or killed. The pedestrians and the motorists become sitting ducks.

And, Hattin repeated many times, this rally, this gathering of mothers is about stopping terrorists. Everyone is vulnerable to the violence. In last week’s shooting attack which claimed the life of Yaakov Don HY”D, a resident of Alon Shvut and Ezra Schwartz HY”D, an 18 year old American student, an innocent Palestinian Arab, Shadi Arafa, was also shot and killed.

“We have Arab workers in Alon Shvut, Arab workers and patrons in the restaurant and in the Rami Levi (supermarket), they also need to be protected,” Hattin said.

“We need better security checks. We want a checkpoint here on this road, where so many of the attacks have taken place,” she continued, “the car with the terrorist who shot the people last week had Israeli plates, but he had a gun in the car – people are carrying huge knives with which to murder our children and neighbors,” Hattin explained.

“We do not want an Apartheid state, we want safety for everyone, safety from terrorism and from violence,” the rally’s organizer told the JewishPress.com.

“We are mothers coming together, we want solutions, we want Arabs and Jews to be able to co-exist, but right now our kids are being murdered and that has to stop,” Hattin said. “Apathy cannot be tolerated,” was a big part of the message they wanted to send.

The Young Israel rabbi of the family of Palestinian Authority murder victim Ezra Schwartz called on all religious leaders to condemn terror.

Schwartz, 18 and from the Boston suburb of Sharon, was one of three people shot and killed when a Palestinian Authority terrorist went on a shooting spree Thursday afternoon at the entrance to Alon Shvut in Gush Etzion, using a Uzi sub-machine gun.

Having run out of ammunition, he then sped away and rammed into people at the Gush Etzion junction before he was apprehended.

The other two people murdered in the attack are Alon Shvut resident Yaakov Don, 49, and a Hebron Arab identified as Shadi Arafeh, 24.

Two women wounded in the ramming attack are in good condition, and one of them is scheduled to be released from Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem Friday morning.

Schwartz was killed when the terrorist opened fire on a line of cars. He and his fellow students from the Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh were in the area to distribute food to soldiers.

He graduated from Maimonides School in the Boston suburb of Brookline this year.

He and his family were members of the Young Israel of Sharon synagogue, where friends and members were overwhelmed by grief after hearing of the murder of Schwartz, who is to be buried on Sunday.

It has been silently accepted that virtually no religious leaders have categorically condemned Palestinian Authority and Israeli Arab attacks. Reform and Conservative rabbis are rarely heard, except to condemn settlements and sermonize on “two states.”

Muslim clergy are out of the picture completely. Priests can mention it without lecturing Israel for “causing” terror because it allows Jews to live in Judea and Samaria.

A haunting acceptance of Islamic terror, especially the murders of Jews, has sown seeds justifying it. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has tried denying he excused terror this week by commenting in Paris that he could understand the “rationale” for the murders at the offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine last January. One of the victims was a Jewish cartoonist.

Kerry explained he was not defending terror or rationalizing it but simply saying he understands the reasoning of terrorists.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Thursday that “blindness and hypocrisy” stops people from condemning attacks as vehemently as the Islamic State (ISIS) massacres in Paris a week ago.

The Maimonides School stated:

The community is profoundly saddened as we mourn the tragic loss of our recent graduate, Ezra Schwartz, Class of 2015, who was murdered in a terrorist attack today in Israel. Ezra was spending his gap year studying in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with Ezra’s family, classmates and friends.

Maimonides School teacher Lori Kipnes told the Boston television station WCVB:

The whole school went into shock. The middle school and the upper school immediately canceled classes, and everybody came together to pray. At first, we heard he was hurt and was in surgery in critical condition. We were praying for his safety and his recovery, but then we got the news that it was too late.

Schwartz is the second alumni of the Maimonides school to be murdered in the last 12 months. Rabbi Moshe Twersky, 59, was killed in the November 14 butchery of five men, four of them rabbis, at a synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof. The victims were praying when two Jerusalem Arab terrorists attacked them with butcher knives, axes and a gun.

Three people were murdered and seven wounded in a shooting and ramming attack on Thursday in Gush Etzion.

The IDF reported that an initial inquiry reveals that the terrorists opened fire from a passing vehicle at a shuttle van at the intersection of Alon Shvut, and then carried on towards the Gush Etzion junction — where they collided with a private car. Security forces who arrived at the scene shot one terrorist dead.

MDA forces in Gush Etzion junction reported that after resuscitation attempts medics and paramedics determined the death of an 18-year-old American yeshiva student on the scene.

In addition, the forces provided medical care and evacuated to the Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center a 50-year-old man in very serious condition with a gunshot wound in his upper body. The man was unconscious.

The 50-year-old man, a teacher from Gush Etzion, died from his wounds. The man was identified as Yaacov Don from Alon Shvut.

The third murdered victim in the terror attack was an Arab pedestrian.

Six additional Israelis were lightly injured and evacuated to receive treatment at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.

One of the terrorists was killed, a second terrorist was captured with an Uzi sub-machine gun.

(JNi.media) Better late than never? Dalia Lemkus, 26, from Tekoa, in Judea and Samaria, who survived a stabbing attack in Gush Etzion in 2006, finally fell prey to another terrorist on Monday night, October 11, 2014. A full year later, on Monday night, October 20, 2015, “in accordance with a directive from Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon,” Israeli security forces demolished the home of Maher Hamdi Zuhair Rashdi Al-Hashlamoun in Hebron.

Al-Hashlamoun, 26, a resident of Hebron, drove his car to the Alon Shvut junction and ran over Dalia Lemkus. The terrorist then got out of his vehicle and stabbed his victim multiple times. Witnesses at the scene attempted to fight him off, and the assailant stabbed two of them as well. Later that day, Dalia Lemkus died of her injuries.

Lemkus was wounded in another stabbing attack, in February 2006, when she was only 17. She was lightly wounded when a 28-year-old Hebron resident arrived at the Gush Etzion Junction with a knife and started stabbing Lemkus and another man, who was moderately hurt. A police officer on vacation happened at the scene of the attack, noticed the terrorist, got out of his car and cocked his weapon. The terrorist then fled the scene.

IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said in a statement: “One year ago, a terrorist rammed his car and stabbed people standing at a bus stop at the Alon Shvut junction, murdering Dalia Lemkus. Last night’s activity sends a clear message that there is a personal price to pay when you are involved in terrorism. We will utilize all the necessary means in order to protect innocent civilians from the atrocities of those engaged in stabbing, shooting and the killing of innocent Israelis.”

According to data collected by statistician Nehemia Gershuni, there have been 48 stabbing attacks against Jews by Arabs between September 18 and October 18, 2015. On its face, this should mean 48 demolitions in the near future. But, so far, Israeli authorities have executed only two demolitions of terrorist homes, while canceling at the last minute the demolition of an Arab apartment building in east Jerusalem that was declared an eyesore and had been approved for razing by Israel’s high court.